Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 55: Shallow Teams, Vague Goals, and Pandemic Screen Time

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

In this episode of Deep Questions I answer reader questions about working deeply with shallow teams, taking action on vague goals, and reducing screen time during a pandemic. We also celebrate reaching the million download milestone for this podcast.To submit your own questions, sign up for my mailing list at calnewport.com. You can also submit audio questions at https://www.speakpipe.com/CalNewportPlease consider subscribing (which helps iTunes rankings) and leaving a review or rating (which helps new listeners decide to try the show).Here’s the full list of topics tackled in today’s episode along with the timestamps:DEEP DIVE: The Deep Reset, Part 4WORK QUESTIONS * Overcoming failure to launch with self-help advice [12:19] * Time blocking unpredictable events. [16:34] * Working with people who are the opposite of deep. [18:60] * Deep work for sales jobs (or managers, or support staff). [26:13] * Juggling multiple big projects. [31:14] * Pursuing vague goals. [33:55]TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS * Distraction withdrawal symptoms. [37:41] * My tech setup. [45:12] * Achieving video-game level concentration. [50:11] * Learning algorithms on your own. [52:34] * Building a brand without social media. [59:17] * My podcast ingestion strategy. [1:01:42]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS * Digital minimalism and human connection during lockdowns. [1:03:08] * Scheduling free time. [1:13:24] * How to review metrics. [1:16:36] * Overcoming deep work avoidance. [1:17:42]Thanks to listener Jay Kerstens for the intro music. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The Deep Questions podcast is brought to you in part by Policy Genius. Now, it's the holiday season, which means you're probably spending more money than you're comfortable with. This is not a bad time of year to start thinking. Is there some savings I could be enjoying in one place that people often don't consider is insurance. By reshopping your insurance, you can often find policies and bundles that can save you a surprising amount of money policy genius can help. So here's how it works. You go to policy genius.com.

You answer some questions about yourself. They have an insurance marketplace where they compare rates from over 30 top insurers so you can see what is available to you. But then, this is part of their secret sauce, they have licensed experts that look at these quotes and help figure out, is there some way to bundle X with Y

or to combine Z with A or Hoh, they work to maximize the amount of money you can saving by shifting your home and auto insurance. The average amount of money saved by people using PolicyGenius is $1,000 per year, and it is simple to use. So if you want to find out how much you could save on home and auto insurance, go to policygenious.com. They have saved their home and auto insurance customers an average of $1,000 a year. That's policy genius.com. When it comes to insurance, it's nice to get it right. I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life. Let's do some quick announcements.

Announcement number one, we have finally made it to that arbitrary milestone I have been looking forward to for the last six months, which is we have crossed the one million download mark. So thank you for all of you who have been listening and downloading this show since I introduced it in May. It has definitely given me something positive to focus on during the heart of the pandemic. If you want to help other people find out about the podcast, subscriptions, ratings, reviews, those all help.

If you want to give me your feedback for changes I can make as we head into the new year to make the podcast even better, you can send those notes to interesting at calnewport.com. Second quick announcement, this podcast is being released during the same week as Christmas. So if you are a Christmas person, Merry Christmas. I had an ambitious plan to decorate the Deep Work H.Q for the holiday. I thought it would cheer me up when I was in here working on those dark early winter days, but I never really got around to it. For a good reason, though, I think the good reason being we're doing so much at home with the family right now that I'm actually at the HQ, a lot less in December than I was earlier.

So I think that's a good reason for why I didn't get to the decorations. But next year, for sure, I am going to deck this place out. All right, that's enough with announcements. Let's get to the deep dive. We have arrived at part four of our deep dive. to the topic of the deep reset. The deep reset being, of course, that human drive to want to respond to disruption or challenge positively by remaking your life into something more meaningful or more satisfying.

Now, in the last part, you constructed a heaven, hell imagery exercise. That is, you constructed an image, a narrative image of what your life would be like, the negative aspects if you do not make changes. And then you constructed a narrative description of how your life could be better. What a better life would look at, would look like, rather, if you did respond to the disruptions you're going through with positive change. Today, as promised in part four, we are going to talk about how you actually take concrete action on getting away from this imagery of hell and towards this heaven vision.

That's what we want to talk about today. So here's the first thing I want to lay down here as a foundation for this discussion. Trying to do too much at once when it comes to changes is a recipe for no changes happening at all. You overload the circuits, the whole thing shorts out, the whole initiative will diminish. So we want to be focused in our transformation efforts. It's better to be sequential than parallel. Change, followed by another change, fold by another change, as opposed to trying to do 10 at once.

Now, to be more specific about this, I would say you should be working on one concrete objective at most in each of the major areas of your life that you were looking to transform during your deep reset. We talked about these earlier in this series. You might have an area around craft, what you do for a living. You might have an area around community, your connection with your family, with your friends, with those who actually live around you, those that you actually work with as well. You might have an area of your life focused on constitution, that is, your actual physical health, and you might have one around contemplation.

That is your ethical, your theological, your philosophical, foundations for how you approach your life. So you have these different areas. At most, one objective in each of these areas should be. within your sites at once. Again, we're going for sequential transformation here. Change, followed by another change, followed by another change. Now, I'm going to suggest when you're trying to identify a milestone for a particular area of your life is, first of all, you want it to be concrete.

But second of all, this is a hack I am going to suggest. If possible, have a literal, almost physical. component to the objective coupled with a behavioral change. So you can focus your energy at first on making progress on the physical component of the objective. And as that finishes, it's your springboard into the behavioral change. And that might sound a little bit vague. What do I mean by that? Well, let's be concrete. Let's talk about constitution. Let's say you want to exercise more. You could jump straight into the behavioral change. I want to. I want to a run every day, you know, or whatever it is. But we've seen this script before. We know it can be

difficult because you say, okay, I guess I should and you're excited about it first and your excitement wanes and you stop doing it. What you might do instead is actually have a physical change. Let's say, I am going to take this garage space and transform it into a home gym. It's a physical, literal thing. You're taking a space, you're changing it. It's clear when you're done. And then couple that with, I will then use that home gym to do this workout that I heard about from someone online or that, you know, a friend of mine does. It's much more effective. For whatever reason, these types of changes are much more effective when you have this literal

physical thing you're doing because we can focus on literal physical things much easier. I got to make progress on this. I got to buy the mats for the gym. I got to get the weight rack, whatever it is. You're focusing on something concrete. It's making a concrete manifestation of an intention in your mind, manifest in the world, this is what we're really good at doing, but it builds up momentum. And on the back of that momentum, you throw in the behavioral change. When you could imagine this in the bucket of craft,

maybe you're trying to intensify and increase the amount of deep work you do on a certain type of professional endeavor. Maybe you're writing a book or you're trying to build out a new skill so you can reclaim your career. You might in this case say, great, what is my physical literal primal? for this objective is maybe I'm going to take that shed in my backyard, I'm going to convert it into a deep work retreat. You have to clean it out. I'm going to put in some drywall. I'm going to have to bring in a heat source because it's cold out there.

Maybe bring an electrical line. I'm going to have to trench out that electrical line. It's a physical thing you're trying to do. But then once that deep work retreat is done, it's much easier to couple that with the behavioral change of, that's my first 90 minutes every day. That's my two hours from 7 to 9 a.m. Whatever it is.

So that is a hack I'm going to suggest. So to summarize, at most one concrete objective you're working at in each of the major areas of your life, aimed a course at getting you closer to that vision, the heaven vision of a better life, the type of life you want to get from your reset, at most one concrete objective in each of the major areas of your life. And when possible, use the hack of having a physical thing that you're trying to be. to accomplish that is coupled with a behavioral change, let the momentum of trying to work on this physical, literal thing vault you forward into making progress on the associated behavioral

change. Go radical. Don't be timid here. The more radical the change, so like my suggestion of building out a whole gym in your garage, converting a shed into a deep work retreat. It's over the top, but over the top is good. It signals to yourself that you're willing to and able to and currently in the process of making major changes and the momentum that generates when you try to make behavioral changes will be really strong. So that's where we are now. As we are recording this, it's right at the holiday season, we're about to hit the new year. So if you're following along in this series in real time, you'll be coming into the new year ready to begin going after these objectives, these objectives that are moving you closer to your better vision, this vision of a

better life. Use the hack. I suggest it should help. Go radical if you can. Not only is it more fun, but you're going to have stronger changes. Now, how should you monitor this progress? Either monthly or quarterly, you should be checking in. How are these objectives going? Do I need to tailor them? Have I finished one? I need to replace it with another. And you should be looking at this monthly or quarterly plan every week when you're thinking about what you want to do that week. So if you're building out your home gym in the garage, you should see that as you'd make your weekly plan and say, well, great, let me put some time aside on Tuesday morning to go by this, and I'm going to put aside a couple hours on Thursday evening to clean out this.

You see the plan every week. You put it into your weekly plan so progress is made. You reflect and review on these quarterly or monthly plans on a regular basis. You update them as you need to change them or as you actually get things done. Now, there's one last piece to this deep reset discussion that I want to touch on. And that is the resetting of your career. Of all of the changes that you might make when trying to do a deep reset, the one that is most fraught, but also most compelling for a lot of people is making some sort of major change in their working life. This is a transformation that's often way too complex to be captured just with one of these objectives that's in your monthly plan that you kind of work on each

week. It's going to require a lot more thinking, and therefore I think it is worthy of its own segment. So we will wait until the next deep dive segment in which we will focus specifically on how to apply the concept of the deep reset on your working life. So we'll pick up this deep dive in the next full-length episode. For now, let's do some work questions. We'll start off this episode with a question from Malik, who asks, I have listened to your book Deep Work more than 10 times and have read its summary more than 30 times, and yet I have failed to follow your advice. I am a self-help article reading junkie. How do I overcome this behavior? Well, Malik, I think you have the information. It's time to actually start focusing on implementation, and I'm going to try to

demystify for you how you begin to get started introducing some of the ideas from deep work into your life. I want to get rid of a perfectionist tendency here, an idea that there's some exact way you have to do things and that you have to get things just right. It's all about just making progress towards more depth and less shallowness. So if you're someone who chronically procrastinates on putting advice into action, I would say start with a keystone habit. Try to find a habit that you can do every single workday and that you track. So wherever you track your metrics, like in a time block planner or in a notebook or in a text file in your computer desktop where you can write down, did I do this or not, try to come

up with a keystone habit that is connected to deep work. It should be easy enough that you can with just a little bit of. effort, get this done every day, but not so easy that it's trivial. So, for example, maybe you just want to record the number of deep work hours you did every day in some sort of metric tracking notebook, even if that number is zero. Don't worry, the fear of writing down zero again and again will push you probably to do deep work where you might otherwise not have. That's a perfectly fine keystone habit. or maybe you have a particular time that you want to do a little bit of deep work every day,

time that you know it's consistently available, like 8.30 to 9 each morning before the day gets going, you work deeply on X, whatever it is. You want to have a habit that you do, and you do it every day, and you record every day that you've done it. This does two things. A, it signals to yourself that you take deep work seriously and that you are able and willing to make positive changes in your life towards this action. And it also has you just doing more deep work, even if minor, you get that positive feedback. Oh, I like this. I'm doing this half hour every morning.

It feels good. I'm getting things done. I want more of that positive feeling. Both of these effects will help you break out of a procrastinatory mindset. Once you have a keystone habit that's locked in, now you can do bigger optimizations to your habits. Maybe you want to put into place a deep work scheduling philosophy. This is when I do my deep work.

Maybe you want to negotiate a deep, the shallow work ratio with your supervisor or with yourself if you work for yourself. Maybe you want to have rituals built out around your deep work sessions or you want to build out a new space just where you do deep work or you want to do a radical overhaul to your productivity systems so that all of the non-deep tasks in your life can be tamed and not scare you away from concentration. My only advice here is to be sequential. One optimization at a time. And until you get it right or give up on it, that's what you're focusing on. Then you move on to the next. So maybe you're trying to get a scheduling philosophy

that works. Focus on that till you have one that works. Then you might say, let's work. Let's work on my productivity system. So one thing at a time. All right, so Malik, I think that'll help Keystone habit to break the seal, then bigger optimizations that you do one at a time, finishing a given optimization your work in life before you move on to the next.

I think you are definitely ready to stop thinking about deep work and actually start thinking deeply. Francis says, I am a first-year PhD student in computer science. and I work with seven other students in my office. I use time blocking to manage my day, but most days I have to readap my schedule to fit others' needs. For example, the lunchtime is variable from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.

and often I end up wasting time and endless pauses waiting for others to join me. Another example is the coffee break, which can occur from 3 to 5 p.m. Francis, I don't think this is a particularly hard problem. I would say use combo blocks. So for the lunch break, have a block for the entire period of time in which lunch could fall and have it be a combo block lunch slash some other thing. So you just work on the other thing until lunch.

And then you go back to the other thing for whatever time remains before the block ends. I talk about this combo. block strategy a little bit in the introduction to the time block planner. I would just suggest making that other thing administrative. This is a good time to do emails or fill out forms, things that you can be interrupted from and then get back to without you really caring too much about the cognitive cost of that context switch. Same thing for the coffee break. If it falls somewhere between three to five, you know, you have a combo block for three to five. I'm working on X plus the coffee break when it happens. I would also say, by the way, that maybe just do the coffee break two days a

week, or maybe just do it three days a week, so that other days you can have that whole afternoon unbroken for the type of concentration that's crucial to be a PhD student computer science. I know it's good to socialize, and I'm glad you are, but also keep in mind that if you are time blocking as a PhD student, that means you're going to be ending your workday at a reasonable hour consistently. which is going to free up your evenings, which means you have all of these evenings free for socializing, right? So if you're having lunch with your office mates

and doing the coffee break two or three times a week and you are doing interesting social things most evenings, I think you will be just fine. All right, so I think this is an easy problem to solve Francis. So get back to studying your algorithms and writing your conference papers. All right, J.R. I currently joined a team that performs the opposite of deep work, and this is stressing me out.

I'm new to the team and observing their practices at the moment, but in a few days working with them, there is just a big attention deficit issue and a complete lack of focus. I see a train wreck ahead. How do I approach the team so that these practices are minimized? JR goes on to elaborate like what type of things are is this team doing and so he mentioned for example

they have an all-day Zoom session open every day of the week the expectation is availability 24-7 on email teams chat even WhatsApp as well as the all-day Zoom chat no time blocking is performed ad hoc meetings all week long

Well, JR, first of all, let me validate your feelings. This is very stressful. This team is bad at working. You are right. They are wrong. So I just want to say that up front because I am getting stressed out on your behalf from afar right now reading about this team. So I feel you. I'm like Robin Williams in Goodwill hunting.

J.R. It's not your fault. You're like, I know, I know. J.R. It's not your fault. And then you start crying. All right. So what can we do here? Well, honestly, and this is, I don't want to be,

this is kind of facetious, but not really. The book I have coming out in March, it's what they need to read. So when you get to March, you literally just need to say, uh, I will give you $20. if you read this book, because I get into in great detail not only why this is so stupid,

but also why it's arbitrary, and also more importantly, how we could be doing much better. Right. So help is coming, hopefully, in the form of this book. And I say hopefully not because the book is not going to come out in March. It certainly is, but hopefully that it catches on and actually has an impact and is actually convincing. So what can you do until then? Well, this is maybe bad news, but it can be difficult in these situations, especially if you are new to a team to change people. It can be problematic even to explain to your team the way you work. It may seem logical to you, especially if

you're an engineer. Engineers are very logical, so they get into trouble with this. So you might seem very logical that if you have processes, personal processes in place to help you make better use of your attention capital to focus, to not be so distracted, that you should explain this to your teammates. And because your explanations are so logical, they'll have no choice but to say, JR, you're right. Of course you are. We respect and enjoy the rules you use to manage things like your communication, this and that. It doesn't work. It just makes people angry. It makes people defensive. So what I'm going to suggest, what I'm going to suggest for the near future, is that you put in place really clear and aggressive internal processes about how you deal with

your work and you don't really explain them. You just do them. You apologize if you need to, but you allow these processes to let you get stuff done to let you really deliver and to help you be very dependable. So stuff doesn't fall through the cracks. You don't have to be bothered a ton of like when things are in your system, it gets captured, stuff gets done. Apologize when people are like, why weren't you in the Zoom or why didn't you answer your email. Apologize politely. Keep shipping. Keep getting things done. Keep being incredibly dependable.

Keep not letting things fall through the cracks. And over time, you will be happier and they will be implicitly happy with your approach to work. So, for example, you know, you have some clear ways. that you check in to suck in requests and tasks that are coming in over email or in the chat for these various apps you use. You check in at a particular schedule and you have a way of vacuuming these all into your system. People get notes right away. I got this. I'm on it. This is when you can expect me to get back to you by. It all goes into your system. And then you turn back to what you're doing until your next check-in. Right. That could be an example. Two, you can have internal processes

that focuses on how do I minimize the amount of unscheduled back and forth interaction required to get this type of thing done? So maybe I don't know what type of work you do, but like a client request comes in and maybe the typical procedure here is that we just kind of chat back and forth on email or sporadically on WhatsApp trying to figure out a plan. You should have your own system that minimizes the amount of back and forth needed. You don't have to tell people what the system is. but just execute it.

You know, all right, you send the note to everyone. I have this. I'm working on it. This is the work I'm going to do. I'm going to prepare this report. I will send it all to you by tomorrow at 9 a.m. And at that point, we can decide the allocation of resources. A third thing you might want to do here is implicitly or explicitly have office hours.

You know, hey, let's all check in on Zoom. In the morning, let me grab everyone. up at the end of the day, I'm always available, three to five. So you can always nudge people. Like, yeah, I'm three to five. I'm in here. Come grab me. And then they know when to find you. And then you could use these periods for synchronous discussion and collaboration. So you don't have to have lots of back and forth messages in chat. Let's just wait till three to five or the next beginning of the day session. And then we can really figure out who's working on what. do really good configure, you know. You have your Trello boards, your task on different statuses. You have clear columns that keep track of who you're waiting to hear back from on your calendar.

You've really captured your commitments. I mean, look, I'm giving a lot of ad hoc examples here, JR, but basically what I'm saying is you get your act together. You have a lot of internal processes. You're very dependable. People depend that you're going to get things done. People know that things aren't going to fall through the cracks. They know that you get good work done. You subtly push people into your own processes towards office hours, towards set meetings, towards approaches to work. It doesn't require a lot of ad hoc without really belaboring the point,

without explaining why you're doing it, without saying when you're not available. You'll have to do some apologizing, but it'll be less apologizing than you think, and you will be rewarded for getting after it. And then when you get the March, you buy them all copies of my book, and some more systemic changes can then happen.

Russell asks, how do you apply deep work principles to sales jobs? Now, this is also a topic I get into in more detail in my new book, so I can pull some ideas from that here. Russell, it's a really good question. It applies, I think, to more than just sales jobs. I think it also applies to managers. It also supplies to support staff. In general, I think what you're asking is, what if I'm in a job? in which sustained attention over a very long amount of time on a small number of things is not

relevant. So if you're in sales or if you're a manager or if you're in support staff, what you're really trying to do is lots of things that are much shorter. You want to do lots of things that are much shorter in duration. Well, if you're a manager, you want to help give good counsel to this person in your team. You want to make this higher. You want to reallocate this person. into a different project to make better use of their capabilities. That's very different than, say, writing a book chapter or a complex piece of computer code. If you're in sales, you want to make calls, you want to get the background research right, you want to execute contracts.

I mean, everything is important and it's non-trivial, but it's not hour after hour after hour of concentration on one thing. Same thing if you're a support staff. You have a lot of different things coming towards you that you want to handle as well as possible so that those you support can get what they need as efficiently and effectively as possible. So where does deep work apply in those jobs? What I would recommend, the mindset I would recommend, the relevant mindset I would recommend

in these types of jobs is one thing at a time. That the goal is that you're working on one thing at a time. You take the thing. It gets your full attention. You complete it. You shut it down, and then you move to the next thing. Now, in some of these positions, these things might be pretty short. 10 minutes here, one hour here, 90 minutes here, 30 minutes here.

But if you want to reap the type of benefits I talk about in deep work, what you want is this sequentiality. This is what I'm doing. Let me give this my full attention. Let me do it right. Let me shut it down. So there's no open loops. Great.

What's next? You can get a lot of things done that way. but by giving things full attention, you are avoiding all of the harmed that comes with rapid context switching. If you instead are kind of working on this, we'll also check in your email and kind of answering someone else about this other thing,

then coming back to this contract, you're working, but then returning this client's message about this, and then jumping on the phone with this person, they're getting back to the contract, you might feel like you have a lot of balls in the air, but they're all being done poorly, and you're exhausting yourself. So you're going to be more,

effective if you're in sales or if you're a manager or if you're in support if you're able to embrace sequentiality. So maybe I'm working on this one thing until I can be done with it. It gets my full attention. I'm doing it right until either I'm done or I'm at a good stopping point where I record my progress. It goes back in my system. All open, all open loops closed. What's next? Now that what's next, that could be checking email. That could be checking your voicemail. That could be checking Slack. That's not a back. background activity. That is just another thing you do. Say, okay, now I'm checking my email inbox. Let me do this well. Answer this. Put this in my system to answer later. Put this in my CRM system.

Move this to the ticketing system. Throw that one out. Throw that one out. You're giving that your full attention. Now I'm going to work on in this example, whatever, I need to follow up with this client. Great. Let me give that my full attention. We look at the information about this client. Let me clear my head. What's my goal with this call? Okay, let me try it. So that is what I recommend. The deep work mindset, which is about putting your full cognitive resources on one problem at a time and not doing context switching so you can get your full cognitive capacity. The way you apply it to these positions that have many more things to do is this sequential mindset.

So that's what I would say. One thing at a time, until you're at a breaking point or done, close all the open loops, then the next thing. Each thing you're working on, give it your full attention, do it as well as you can, be it a five-minute task or a five-hour task. You will still get a lot more benefits versus this alternative that's so common now, this hyperactive hive mind alternative of let me in parallel constantly be talking about moving information around and responding to notes and questions and messages about work while I'm also trying to do multiple different work simultaneously. Our brain can't do that. One at a time, full attention, as good as you can, shut the open loops, move to what's next. Eric asks, when you have a number of projects that have self-imposed deadlines and require deep work, how do you prioritize them? Could you work on one until it is finished, if so, which one?

Or do a little bit of work on all of them so that you are moving forward on each project? Well, Eric, there's not a definitive answer that applies to all situations. I personally like to use the granularity of one week when thinking about big projects. So one rule of thumb I have is try to keep it to no more than two big projects that you're trying to make progress on in a given week. So I'm working on X and I'm working on Y. I'm working on this article and I'm working on this academic paper. When working on a particular project, I then think about working on it in chunks of roughly one week when I'm trying to think how long to work on it before switching to something else.

So maybe I work on this project for two weeks and then I'm going to pause that. I'm bringing to the rotation another project for a week and then return to the original project and give that three weeks. So I think roughly in a one week granularity because I think it just takes time. there's a big project. It takes time to really get going on it, to come back to it a few times during the same week, to really get some traction, to really make the overhead of switching your attention to the big project worthwhile. So that's why I want to switch on the scale of a day. We work on this project today or then another project tomorrow and the back to this project the next day and then a third project the day after that. I'd like to think roughly about a week as enough time to really get going on a project. So for example, if you have five big projects you're working on, you're never working on more than two at a time. And whatever you're working on, you work on in chunks of a week. So maybe the first week you're working on project one and two.

The second week, you're going to continue working on project one, but you swap in project three for project two. Then maybe the third week, you've hit a good stopping point in project one. So now you're going to work on project four and five that week and so on. Again, these are rules of thumb. It depends on the type of work you're doing. the deadlines and your style and also how much time you have free. Is this the only thing you're working on? Are you trying to fit these in the background as side hustle projects?

In which case, maybe you can only fit one per week. But I think these heuristics are a good starting point for thinking about how you juggle these projects because they emphasize what I think is important. Things take time before you can make progress. And there's only so many things that are hard that you can be juggling simultaneously. Let's do one more work question here. Fraser asked, how do you configure and control projects whose goals are vague or unknown at the outset without further research? So I think what he is asking is when you have a goal that's kind of vague, how does that become the type of concrete task that you can actually configure?

In my capture, configure control philosophy of productivity, the configure step is where you make sense of the things on your plate. You clarify them. you give them particular statuses. He's asking, well, how do I do that? How do I take something really vague and get it to these sort of concrete tasks that I'm clarifying and giving statuses? And then with the control stage of capture, configure, control, you're actually putting aside time to make progress on things. So I'm interpreting this question of saying, how do I get from vagueness to this type of concrete configuring and controlling? Well, Frazier, I think the key is to take it one step at a time.

If you have a vague project, do not expect it just through sheer concentration you can sit there during a weekly planning session and translate that vague goal into a very clear blueprint of I'm going to do this and this and this and this and this and let's just go schedule. Now often what you can do when you have a vague goal is just take the first step towards trying to make it less vague. So you said, for example, how do you configure and control projects whose goals are vague or unknown at the outset without further research? Well, for example, you schedule for the research. That's the thing that gets configured. That's the thing that you ultimately put aside time for. Maybe I need to talk to people. I need to meet with my team.

I need to read something. Maybe I just need to think about this. What does this actually mean? So you get concrete actions that help you make progress on clarifying a goal. That's what gets scheduled. Not the whole thing, but the next concrete action that might get you closer towards understanding. if you want to go after this goal or not and what that will actually mean.

Now you might be worried about forgetting these vague goals. Where do vague goals live in my type of systems? Well, there's a couple different places depending on how imminent the vague goal is. If it's pretty important, like I need to work on this soon. Like in the next few months, this is very important. It should be in your quarterly plan. Like, hey, this is what we're working on. So make sure every week that we're scheduling some,

concrete steps towards making this vague goal more clear. If it's less time sensitive, well, you should have some sort of idea tracking system. On this podcast, I talk a lot about how, for example, I use Evernote to keep track of a lot of things, a lot of ideas surrounding, let's say, like articles and books in the media business that I have built out around my writing life. I have notebooks for that. I review them on a regular basis. I really look closely when I review my quarterly plans. I look at those ideas to see if anything in there needs to come into my quarterly plans. So have some sort of long-term idea system so that vague goals can live, and as they become relevant, they move to your quarterly plan, and once they're in your quarterly plan, you start

chipping away at them. Not trying to figure the whole thing out at once, but chipping away at them with, well, here are some concrete things I can do next to clarify the goal, to understand it better, to make more progress on it. And over time, that vagueness gives way to concreteness, and you can figure out, is this worth pursuing? Do I need to change it? Do I need to get rid of it altogether? So, Fraser, I hope that helps you get a clearer picture

on how to deal with unclear objectives. And with that in mind, let's move on to our next objective, which is technology questions. Catherine says, I really want to make the break from feeling constantly attentionally distracted and move into a more settled mind and do more deep work. But I feel constantly edgy.

That's the best way to describe it. Despite unsubscribing from all notifications, I notice that my brain is craving some kind of distraction stimulation. It's edgy from reading regular news updates, checking social media and email too often. How do you get through this and out the other side? How long does it take? How can you fast track the process? I feel constantly cognitively fuzzy and edgy. Well, Catherine, I have a lot of data to draw from here. So when I was doing research for my book,

digital minimalism, I ran an experiment in which over 1,600 readers went through a similar process where they stepped away from what we called optional personal technologies like social media, like online news, like most of the things that happen on your phone, they stepped away for 30 days and they told me about it. So I got a nice insider view on what it's like to step away from these technologies for lots of different people who are in lots of different situations. So what I can tell you, based on this data, is that if you were doing this reduction properly,

that edginess feeling can last for 10 to 14 days. that was pretty consistent. After about 10 to 14 days, it dies down. And that impulse to look at the phone, to fire up the browser tap, that impulse dies down. It no longer feels natural. You know, I had one young woman tell me in one of her reports about going through this experiment for digital minimalism, that in that first week, that impulse, that edginess was so strong that she found herself compulsively checking the weather app on her phone.

It was the only thing she had left on her phone that actually had information that was updating. And she had such a compulsion to a need new information from my phone that she would just check the weather all around the world. And she joked for me that there was a period of about a week there in which she knew the weather conditions and half a dozen major cities around the world down to the one hour granularity because she had to check something. By day 10, she didn't. By day 14, she was barely using her phone at all. So it does get better. But Catherine, the key word I used earlier was properly.

So if you actually want to get a withdrawal to detox from this edgy sense that I have to look at stimuli, you really have to take this process seriously. If you're just doing some things, if you just turn off your notifications, for example, it's not going to be enough. If you're checking something, sometimes, but then trying to not check it other times, you're never going to get through the detox. You have to take the process seriously.

So here's what I recommend. Everything off your phone. Everything. Any application where someone makes money on your time and attention, get it off your phone. No online news, no social media, no video games, no online videos. Get rid of the YouTube app.

It might be worth temporarily taking the browser off of your phone or making it harder to access. Dumb down that phone until it cannot deliver you information. Then go to your computer. Go to your computer where you can still access these things

and change all your passwords. See, I don't want to ask you to quit things yet. Let's just start one thing at a time. Change all your passwords to things that are annoying. Do not save the password when it asks you if you want to save it. Write them down on a piece of paper. So now if it's, I got to check Instagram, you're going your computer, you're booting it up,

you're going to a web browser, you're typing in Instagram.com, you're typing in your username, you're pulling out that post-it note, and you got that 20-character random password that you're going to enter in, it's going to take a couple minutes. You can still access it. If there's something important you need to do, you can, but it can't be a knee-jerk. It can't be a response to a moment of edginess. It actually takes some effort, that effort's going to have some friction. Now it's going to be very difficult for this to be a knee-jerk behavior.

Now you're in a good place for your body to begin its withdrawal process, and 10 to 14 days will get you there. The final element I want to add, though, for elaborating on my term properly, is that I learned from that experiment I did for the book Digital Minimalism, that if you just white-knuckle this process, your chances of success are diminished. So what do I mean by white-nuckling? And if you just say, I'm going to stop using these services, I'm going to do what Cal says, I'm going to take it off my phone, complex passwords, unsaved on my desktop, and you just sit there white knuckling saying, don't use it, don't use it, don't use it.

Good luck. The people in my experiment who did that had a hard time succeeding. So what is your alternative? Actively and aggressively finding replacement activities. Through reflection and experimentation, you go out there and you say, this is what I'm doing with my time instead. Positive things, things that make you feel better, things that you value. I have this social impulse. Well, I'm volunteering for this, and I'm walking every day with these friends, and I'm helping out with this elderly neighbor, and I'm volunteering for

this thing this happening at my church, and whatever. Entertainment. I'm reading this book. I'm teaching myself how to cook. I'm, you know, bought this course on beer tasting or something and pairing with food, and I went around the state to find these fancy Belgian beers, I'm going to try them with different foods. You're replacing. You're replacing what these services were doing for you. You're finding different ways to connect.

You're finding different ways to have gratitude. You're finding different ways to entertain yourself. You're finding different ways to engage with the world around you. You're finding different ways to be exposed to things that are uplifting. Replace the low-quality sources of these valuable things with high-quality sources. you will be much more likely to succeed with not going back without making these, again, a knee-jerk default reaction. All right, so I'm putting a lot on your plate here, Catherine. Read the book Digital Minimalism to be walked through this, why you should do it, how you should do it exactly what I found when

other people tried it, what to focus your time on how to replace this with better activities. I mean, that's that whole book. So I'm giving you a very high-level summary here. but just to summarize, if you're going to cut down on this edgy, addictive need to be looking at things online, you've got to seriously take everything off your phone to make it hard to access, and you have to aggressively fill that time with high-quality alternatives. If you do those two things, 10 to 14 days, your life is going to feel completely different. Try this right now. Through the holidays is a great time to be doing this because there's plenty of opportunity

to be focused on community and family and friends during the holidays. holidays. Do this right now. Early in the new year, you could find yourself with a completely different relationship with online information, news, and entertainment, a relationship that I think is going to be much more healthy for you. All right, Jay asks, can you go through the hardware you use, computer, iPad, etc., and what you use it for? For example, you said you bought an iPad with Apple Pencil. It would be nice to know how you use it and what you use it for. Well, Jay, I'm happy to go through this. I don't know how exciting it is, but here we go.

I have a MacBook Air notebook computer. In my studio, I have a sort of souped-up I Mac that I use. That's where I capture my video and capture my audio and edit my podcast. I have an old iPhone. I mean, I don't know what it is. It's back when they used to be small. I guess they have small ones again now, but mine is back from the age when,

They used to be small because I don't want a large phone. I think it takes up too much space in my pocket and I don't use it that much. I do have an iPad and Apple Pencil. I bought that for virtual teaching. So I was teaching algorithms this fall to undergraduates and I am a Blackboard teacher. I need the ability to draw out proofs, to draw out algorithms, to do analyses. I do it all in the Blackboard. So since we were virtual this semester, I did it with an Apple Pencil on my iPad,

which I then share screen through Zoom so that my students could see that full screen. That's mainly what I use it for. I also read on the iPad sometimes. There's occasions. There's certain books I have to review or books I'm doing blurbs for where they only exist in digital copies, right?

Because it's before the book is actually published, so I can only read it as a digital copy. I found I've enjoyed reading those on the iPad as well when I don't have the option of having a physical book. book. That's about it. You know, I have a Kindle, four or five years old, but I read a lot on my Kindle as well as a lot on physical books. I just read a lot of books, and I like with the Kindle, if I need a book right away, I can get it. My studio has a bunch of audio and video equipment, but I don't know how interesting that is. My mic, I have a mic, and an audio processor and a mixing

board and a pretty nice camera that connects through a capture card and a bunch of LED lights, etc, et cetera, et cetera. But that's really very specific to doing podcasting. So that's my setup. It's not super exciting. But then again, I think there's a point there. Like one of the things I wrote about in that recent New Yorker article on personal productivity was how there was this moment when I was coming up in the late 90s and early 2000s,

this moment of what was known as productivity pronged that really believed that tech could be at the core of satisfying productivity. With the right software, the right interfaces, the right digital tools, the difficulty of work could be significantly reduced. This was the vision. If you just had the right configuration of Omnifocus, hooked up with Quicksilver,

going into your souped up EMAX shortcuts, it would make everything kind of effortless, and essentially you would be outsourcing a lot of the difficulty of work into software. Work would be less difficult. You'd be more successful. You'd be happier.

You'd be less stressed out. You want to procrastinate, etc. As I wrote in that article, that vision of productivity prong largely did not come to pass. Better technology helped some things at the margins, made a few things more efficient, you know, made some things easier to do. But it missed the reality that work is just ultimately hard.

There's just an unavoidable cognitive friction of trying to take your brain and produce valuable information to figure out how to reply to this message or to write this memo. It's just hard. It's always going to be hard. You can't offload that to the computer. And so this vision of tech making work easier

didn't really work out. Basically what tech did has made particular activities more efficient. But as I write about it my new book coming out in March, even that often had unexpected side effects. So like email, for example, made it easier to communicate. It was literally less friction for me to send you an email than to leave you a voice message, but then it had the unintentional side effect of making us communicate a lot more,

which actually made work much more difficult. It made us less happy. So it's really been a mixed reaction what tech has brought into the workplace. So I do have a simple tech setup. And in part, that's why is because in the end, you know, I have my word processor where I write. I'm proud of the fact that even though this MacBook Air, is new. It's from March. I've already worn away. I'm looking at it now. One, two, three, four, five, six of the keys just through usage. I write so much that I've already worn away the letters

off of six of the keys. So my simple MacBook, my word processor, I plan my day on my time block planner. Good enough, let's get to work. Pablo asks, how can I be as concentrated as I get while playing video games. I mean, I think what this question is saying, how can he achieve the same level of concentration he feels when playing video games when he's doing other things, like professional work where concentration would help him get things done better or get things done faster? Well, Pablo, I don't think that you are going to easily replicate that level of rapt attention that video games generate, and it's because video games are aggressively engineered to create

exactly that effect. In terms of its feedback, the difficulty, the leveling up, when it lets you make progress, when it actually gets in the way of the progress, all of this is engineered to create this hijacked mental experience of complete wrapped concentration. I would point you towards the book Irresistible by Adam Alter. He gets into this a lot in that book, how video game companies have really put so much attention into making their video games irresistible by essentially hijacking the way our brain works. So do not use that level of rap obsessed attention that video games can create.

Do not use that as your milestone of what you want to achieve when you're, let's say, working on a problem set or writing a memo or trying to figure out a business strategy. The video game concentration is highly artificial. It's sort of like saying, you know, I wish I could get that same sense of elation that comes after I do a bump of Coke. I wish I could just get that by having a good diet and exercising a lot. like how do I, how do I replicate that? And you don't because the Coke is a drug that permeates the blood-brain barrier and screws with your neurotransmitters in a highly artificial way. And you're just not going to get there with kale or exercise.

And you shouldn't try. And you probably shouldn't be doing the bumps of Coke in the first place. But that's a whole other discussion. In this tortured analogy, video game concentration is like the cocaine high. It's its own weird artificial thing. It has its own problems. You're not going to get there. but where you do want to get when you're working on things that are important

is unbroken concentration, whether it feels good or not, no context switching, whether that's easy or not, and a sense of pride when you're done with one of those deep work sessions that this got some attention, I created something that I am happy about. Rajan says, I'm trying to teach myself algorithms. I've tried reading the CLRS intro to algorithms book, but it's getting pretty dense, getting through even a chapter feels like a mission.

All right, for those who don't know, CLRS is the abbreviation for a popular computer science intro to algorithms textbook. It's an abbreviation of the author's last name, so it's Corman, Leicerson, Revest, and Stein. I know this book well. I actually teach out of it. I taught out of it this fall.

I taught out of it last spring. A little bit of an aside region. I mean, I actually have quite a connection to this textbook. So Corman is who I learned algorithms from. I took algorithms from Corman at Dartmouth. Leicerson and Revest, they were both in the theory group when I was there in grad school at MIT. So my office was sort of down to hall from Leicerson and Revest. I T-Aid for Revest.

I T-Aid for Ron Revest Network Security class. And I never wrote a paper with Leicerson, but I worked with a lot of his students. I think Stein was at Dartmouth a little bit before my time, so I'm not as connected. So I know that textbook well. I know the authors well. I've been teaching that textbook for a while. That is a bit of an aside. Stepping back, I think the issue here is how do you learn hard things on your own?

It's pretty daunting to pick up a textbook and just say I'm going to read all the chapters. Regine, I don't think that's the right way to learn algorithms. If you really want to learn this complex topic on your own, I think you need more structure. I would suggest actually taking an online course on algorithms so that you can get lectures that are focused on one topic at a time. You can then do exercises and problem sets to try to master it. You can get feedback from TAs or other students about how well you are doing. You are going to need more structure.

Don't just dive into a textbook. If you don't want to take an online course, we'll at the very least, exercises and problems. Absolutely the best way to learn this material is to actually. try the material to actually try to solve things. Just sitting there and reading things is not going to get you where you need to get. But I really would recommend take a course, and it could be an online course you pay for. MIT Open Courseware has its computer science curriculum, basically entirely online for free. But more generally, what I'm trying to say here is don't just read the textbook. Have a more structured way of trying to learn this material. Otherwise, you're quite unlikely to really make good

progress. I want to take a moment to talk about one of the sponsors that makes the deep questions podcast possible, and that is Mint Mobile. As I've told you before, Mint Mobile is disrupting big wireless by getting rid of all the overhead that burdens those big wireless suppliers to get you really high quality service at crazily low prices. I'm talking about plans starting at just $15 a month. There's no stores to go to, no people you have to talk to. You can keep your own phone.

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and take advantage of this three-month free promotion if you go to mintmobile.com slash deep. I am also excited to talk about My Body Tudor. Now, if that name sounds familiar, that is a good sign that you are a hardcore Cal Newport fan because the founder of My Body Tudor, Adam Gilbert, back in the early days of my study hacks blog, was the fitness guru.

I knew Adam and I would have him come on and answer questions on my blog about how to get your body in shape so that you could leverage that to get more out of your mind. My Body Tudor is this company that Adam has had for years way ahead of its time

in which they do online fitness coaching. So if you want to get in shape, you work with My Body Tudor, they hook you up with an online coach Adam only chooses the best. These people are great. They help you with your diet plan and your exercise plan. And they talk to you in real time.

Here is your coach. It all happens digital. Here's what should be happening with your diet. What's happening with your workout? They are literally coaching you like a personal trainer, like the Hollywood elite use, but for much cheaper because it's happening online. And they hold you most importantly accountable.

As Adam says, I'm quoting him here. In fitness knowledge isn't the problem. Everyone I talk to knows what to do. Where they struggle is turning information into action. My Body Tudor fixes that with daily accountability and expert support. I've been a fan of Adam's company since I started my blog in 2007. Look, when you're talking to a real coach every day, you get after it. If you want to get in better shape, use My Body Tudor.

I really do endorse this from my personal experience and longtime relationship with Adam. You want to know the type of guy Adam is. His personal cell phone number is at the top of every page of MyBodytutor.com. He says, call me or text me if you have any issues. All right, so here's the deal we worked out. Adam says that if you mentioned that you signed up because of the Deep Questions podcast, he will take $50 off your first month. So just mention when you go to mybodytutor.com that you came here because

Cal sent you and you'll get $50 off your first month. Look, if you guys are serious about getting healthier in the new year, I am serious about recommending Adam and my body tutor. It's hardcore, but it will get the job done. Returning to the questions, Kira asks, how do you build a brand in business without using social media? Well, you know, Kira, I don't overthink this stuff. I try to produce stuff that's good, produce stuff that people really like and that I'm the right person to produce it. I keep trying to get better.

I find ways to connect with people using the internet that feel reasonable to me, that feel appropriate. So, you know, I blog, I have an email list, I podcast, these feel like good ways to reach people, ways to do it with integrity, ways to do it without exploitation. and then I just let the chips fall where they will.

And for me, that has worked out. I would say more generally, this is probably true for most types of individual or content-based businesses. I mean, if you're producing something really good and you're the right person to produce it, then people will find you and want it. And if you're not,

there's just no amount of social media trickery that can alchemize value where there isn't value. Now, if you're worried, let's say you have an existing business and you do stuff over social media and you're worried about losing business. A temporary step you could take is what Joe Rogan calls posting ghost.

So Rogan's approach to social media, he posts stuff on social media, but he never reads responses. He never interacts. He never looks at replies. He posts it and runs for the hills to go work on other things. So if you're already doing social media

and it's nerve-wracking to stuff, step away altogether. You're worried you're going to see a hit in your business. That's a good temporary step. Keep posting stuff, but run for the hills as soon as you hit publish, never read the interaction, because it's really in the interaction. It's really in seeing those replies. It's really in seeing the ways that people push your buttons, be it on purpose or accidentally. That's really where you lose a lot of time. It doesn't lose much time in your life to hit a post that says, you know, Twitter, like, here's my latest article. Or I have a show coming up next to week. Like, that doesn't take up time. It's the back and forth. It's the interaction. So, okay,

there's a tentative step. I just got to tell you long term. It just seems to me, if you're so good, you can't be ignored, you won't be ignored, whether or not there's a lot of people on TikTok who are harding your tweets. All right, let's do one more technology question. Chad asks, how do you ingest podcast, do you restrict listening to certain context, times, places, etc. Well, Chad, it's not that I have a hard and fast rule, but typically I love. I love, like to reserve podcasts for when I'm doing something that's more physical or menial. That's a good time, I think, to expose my brain to interesting ideas or entertainment. So, you know, I'm a parent and I'm a homeowner, which means I spend a lot of time cleaning

dishes, raking leaves, like I was doing this basement, cleaning out all the junk from our basement because we have people coming in to carpet it. There's a never-ending array in my life of non-intellectual, more physical-oriented tasks that leave the brain with nothing to do, I fill that time with books on tape and I fill that time with podcasts. So I would suggest something similar. If in your life you don't have a lot of that time, well, maybe you need more physical and menial labor in your life. Maybe you need some projects to work on outside or some hikes to do or some outdoor sports

to get involved in so that you have more time when you're doing something physical. and then you'll have time to listen to your podcast and you'll get your body moving. I don't know, different things work for different people, but for me, this general strategy has worked quite well. All right, let's move on to some questions now about the deep life. Liz asks, How can we practice digital minimalism

and have meaningful social interactions during periods of lockdowns and online learning? Well, Liz, I think this is a good question. How do you maintain things like social interactions without being on your screen all the time if you're in a period, for example, of heavy pandemic related restrictions? But before we discussed that, I think I should mention, I don't think this is going to be as relevant for you as you might fear. So there's this interesting disconnect going on. As I've mentioned before on this podcast, I write this daily newsletter for my extended family, where I give positive or optimistic news about the coronavirus pandemic, it's meant

to sort of counteract all the negative things that are happening so that people don't become too overwhelmed by the negative. And because of this newsletter, I'm very tuned in to epidemiological sources, right? I follow modelers and epidemiologists. I follow a lot of the raw numbers. It's a sort of minor expertise that I have picked up over the last six or seven months. and I have noticed recently that there's definitely a disconnect between the epidemiological reality of this fall wave in the United States

and the way it's being reported. So, Liz, based on the elaboration you sent me, you have the very, I think, reasonable conclusion, based on the tone of news coverage right now, that there's a really, this wave is going to get much worse and that there's going to be a long period of restrictions and lockdowns coming. The interesting thing is that if you're talking to epidemiologists, if you're talking to modlers, if you're looking at the numbers,

they all say something different. They all say, and have been saying for the last six weeks or so, that we're aiming for the U.S. should see its case peak late December. So basically like next week or early January. Those will start following. Hospitalizations will fall next, then deaths unfortunately lag the farthest behind it. And we're actually seeing this.

The Midwest and the upper Midwest where the fall wave began, their cases have been falling for almost a month now, though it's almost never reported. So they've been falling for almost a month. Europe, which started their fall wave about a month before us, they all saw peaks in November and has seen falls from those peaks since then. If you look at the U.S. numbers, today, according to the COVID tracking project, there's only nine states in the United States in which their seven-day average is increasing.

Yesterday it was eight. A few weeks ago, it was 23. If you look at the actual curves, the epi-curves, or the hospitalization curves, you can also see clearly that the rate increases are rapidly decelerating. So basically what the modelers and epidemiologist said, like roughly late December, early January, as a peak has been more or less accurate, which means, Liz, if you live in a place in which your kids, as you told me, your kids have been in physical school until just last week, so a place that is not really heavy on the restriction spectrum,

it's probably unlikely that you're in a place that's going to be under really strict restrictions suddenly and for a long time into the future. So basically what I'm trying to say here is that some of the discussion we're about to have might be theoretical, or not relevant for as long as maybe we fear. A quick aside, why is there this disconnect? My best understanding is that the media has largely deputized themselves as public health officials.

And so one of the things they are trying to do with their coverage is to induce people to behave in the way they think is most beneficial. So one of the reasons why, like, you don't. see a ton of coverage about cases falling in the Midwest. One reason why they keep talking about the wave to come, even though we're almost to the peak of it, is because if the coverage is focused on what is scary or negative, people are more likely to listen to public health recommendations about various mitigation factors, which can reduce hospitalizations and save lives, etc. I mean, there's a debate to be had about whether the media should be doing this,

whether it is noble or ignoble to try to be helping public health policy as opposed to reporting on it. That's a whole separate debate that I'm not qualified to have. But that's my best explanation for why we can have this sort of dual reality. We're on one hand, we have the experts in the data saying we're coming up to the peak. This is good news. And the coverage makes it seem like we haven't even gotten close to the worst that is yet to come. All right, so let's get to the meat of the question, though, regardless of where the peak is actually going to happen, regardless of whether there's a lockdown in your area or not,

I think we can all agree. It's going to be a little while still until we're not being very, very cautious about how we interact with people. It's going to be a while still to most places do not have community spread, where we can sit down with someone without any fear. So let's talk about how do we keep social interaction alive during these periods without really upping our screen time. So the first thing I want to mention, I've talked about this before,

analog trumps linguistic. And what I mean by that is that text is not a great way to socialize with people because our social brain does not understand text as being a crucial part of social interactions. Our social brain expects analog information, by which I mean, for example, what someone's voice sounds like, the tone of their voice, the pacing of how they talk. If you can see them, their facial expression, their body movement, that type of analog information can take an interaction and make it seem much more fulfilling and meaningful than if you're just sending text messages back and forth or leaving comments on their social media post. So you want to try to have an analog component to your interactions during this period of social distancing. Now, Liz, I get your concern about we spend all day on Zoom anyway, so maybe I don't want to have yet another Zoom screen to talk to my relative. So use a phone.

Actually, I think phone calls are great. You can have your earbuds in. You get the analog component of interaction because you're hearing voices and going back and forth in real time. But you can be talking on the phone while you're on a walk or on a hike or while doing. chores in your house. You're getting away from screen time. You're getting away from that glowing rectangle. You're getting away from those Zoom icons that are being ingrained into our eyes, like used to happen on computers before they invented screen savers. You're still able to interact with people from afar. So that's one piece of advice. Another piece of advice is figure out

what type of conditions make you feel safe about in-person interaction and once you have figured that out and feel good about it, do a lot of those type of interactions. So let me give you a cheat sheet here. Your answer should involve being outside. Your answer should involve being at a distance. Your answer may or may not involve wearing a mask

depending on how big of a distance you are from the other person. But if you do those things, you're not going to spread the virus, but you're in the physical presence of another person. So you can see their body language. You can see their facial expressions. You have the intonations of the note of their voice. And now it's a really analog interaction that's really going to register as meaningful. Also, as I've talked about before, there's a bit of sacrifice involved in actually putting aside time and physically co-locating with someone else. And the more you sacrifice on behalf of a social connection, the more seriously your mind takes it.

So you find a way to do these social interactions in person that is essentially 100% safe. And then once you have identified that, put in the effort to do them. Even if it's cold, you know, that is going to make the interaction more valuable because you've done some sacrifice on behalf of that interaction. So those are the two things I would recommend, Liz. For people who don't live near you, use phone calls instead of Zoom so you can have the analog component, but you don't feel like you're out of screen. Phone calls while on foot, I think, are great because it's a way to get extra exercise

and fresh air as well. Two, you do need to prioritize safe in-person interactions. It's hard to get past the value of in-person. Find a way to do it that's 100% safe. If it's a pain, that's good, because again, that's going to make the interaction seem more meaningful, and then put in the effort to do in just your local community people around you to be able to see people. Even if it's at a distance and even if it's peeking over the edge of a mask, it is still

much better than being completely isolated in a home or just seeing those faces pixelated on a screen. All right. So this winter has started off terribly. The fall has been terrible. Bad stuff is still ahead. The problem with peaks is that all that time it took you to get to the top. You got to take all that time.

down the other side, and that's all time in which people are getting sick. That's all time in which people are being hospitalized. That's all time in which people are dying. So there's nothing good about what's going on now. But I'm just telling you, Liz, I think the light at the end of the tunnel might be a little bit brighter than you think. So in these final dark days ahead, put in the effort to connect, keep it analog, see real people, hear real voices. We will come out of this sooner than I think we fear and let's do so having done everything we can to keep not just our body safe, but to keep our souls thriving as well. All right, I ended up going a little bit longer on that last question than I probably originally planned, but let's see if we can fit in

one or two more quick questions here before calling it quits on this episode. VJ asks, if you are so deep into a procrastination and unfocused lifestyle, is it okay to time block your free time? My work-life workflow is somewhat stabilized, thanks to your methods. But my weekends, however, follow no direction. I have no idea what I'm doing on Saturday or Sunday. I end up haphazardly following whichever way the wind is blowing. So, Vij, that's a good question. I typically recommend, as you know, that you don't completely time-block your weekends

because it is pretty intense to run a time block schedule and you need a break from it. I however feel your pain that if you have no structure to your weekends, it can really go sideways. You can come out of those weekends feeling like, I don't know, nothing got done. You had no focus.

Instead of being recharged, that you're just, it was haphazard. I mean, you can actually become an energy suck instead of an energy gain. So my general recommendation here is that for each of your weekend days, you have one major activity scheduled that happens at a certain time. This should probably be something that is high energy, meaningful, satisfying, a long hike,

going to see a site that you really wanted to see, going to a movie once movies are open, whatever it is, and then have at least one major administrative thing that you schedule specific time for. I'm cleaning the garage, I'm mowing the yard, doing the taxes, and then let the rest of your time be more or less unblocked. So schedule specifically one major meaningful, satisfying energy-producing activity and at least one important administrative push. That should really be the only specific time blocking you do, but that will really give a structure to your day,

help those days feel energizing without being over-scheduled. I have talked about that advice before. I want to add one new wrinkle here, though, VJ, which is you might want to have a few basic metrics, so behaviors that you follow even on the weekend, that you track. Now you mentioned in your elaboration that you use the time block planner.

There's a great space for metric tracking right there in the planner. Take advantage of that. Have a few basic metrics that keep you doing things that are valuable that you track even through the weekend. So, for example, you read two chapters of a book. You have at least one conversation.

with someone that you know or care about, and you walk 10,000 steps, like something like that. Like you have a few metrics you track. You're not time blocking when you're going to do that, but you just don't want to put down zeros or X's next to those metrics. So that will motivate you to find some time to get those done. All right, so that's my summary. Each day, one major thing, one administrative thing,

have a few key behaviors that you track that you do even on weekend days. I think you will find you get a lot more out of your weekends without having to make them overly scheduled. All right, let's do like a lightning round thing here and try to fit in two really fast more questions. Jason, speaking of metrics, Jason says in your time block planner, you allocate space for metric tracking.

While it's a good spot to track daily metrics, do you extract those into a consolidated list for long-term trend analysis to tweak your metrics? So Jason, I think you should analyze those metrics, make conclusions on those metrics, change those metrics, figure out what you want to do with your life based on what you've seen with those metrics. You should do that all when you update your quarterly plan. Your quarterly plan can have a summary of your metrics or what you've learned from, let's say,

the last year, so like the last four quarterly plans. When you update or write a new quarterly plan, that's when you should go back through your time block planner, look at all your metrics, look for trends, look for insights, summarize them in your new quarterly plan, make new decisions based off of what you've discovered. I think that is the right scale and the right place to do this type of metric analysis work. All right, let's fit in one more question. Zahara says, as a person with some avoidance problems,

I find it extremely difficult to commit to a long, deep work session. I know that when I start it will be fine, but I just can't start it. well Zahara three things to recommend one time block plan so just get in the habit of figuring out in advance what you're going to do when and once you're in the habit of that you look at your plan to be like what am I doing now now what am I doing when the answer to that question is deep work you're used to this notion of just okay my plan tells me what I should be doing and I just do it. As opposed to if you have a more loose approach to your day, maybe you use the reactive list-based method of productivity,

and then within that you say, now I'm going to put aside time just to do deep work. Your mind says, I don't know about this. I don't know about this, putting aside some time, let's just go back to email, let's just get back on Slack. But if your whole day is already unfolding in time blocks, whether that time block is check email or write memo or do deep work, is not going to matter as much.

The other two things I'm going to recommend is scheduling philosophies and rituals. I talk about this in the book, Deep Work, but you should have a clear philosophy of this is when I do deep work. Now, for some people, the right answer is the same time every day. For other people, it's,

I plan it out like appointments on my calendar at the beginning of every week. For others, it's a bimodal thing. All day, Monday, I do deep work. But then I do none on Tuesday or however else you want to figure that out, but have some sort of clear way that you schedule deep work. That's the same that you get used to. And it no longer seem to ad hoc. And then finally have rituals surrounding the deep work session.

Don't just wrench your attention from your email inbox and say now it's time to concentrate. Instead, have some sort of ritual you do to help transform your mind from shallow to deep mode. go for a walk. If you can configure a different location that you just do deep work in, that's even better. Clean your desk, make a certain cup of coffee. Whatever you have to do

to have a regular ritual that signals deep work will help reduce this natural procrastinatory impulse. So Zahara, I hope those three things help. Time block everything and deep work will seem less like a special occasion. Have a set scheduling strategy that you just use again and again and again.

and use rituals to make that transition from shallow to deep, require less willpower, and be much more effective. All right, so that is all the time we have for this week's episode. We'll be back Thursday with a Christmas Eve edition of the Habit Tune Up mini episode and then be back next week with the next full-length episode. Until then, as always, stay deep.